Adventure Design

When making your own adventure, you get to choose the themes, play style, and NPCs that most appeal to you and your group. This section gives you tips for making your adventures exciting and memorable, and for creating them quickly and efficiently.

Creating an adventure for your players can be one of the most fulfilling parts of being a GM. Get started with the basic tips on adventure building on page 487 of the Core Rulebook, then flesh out your adventure using the following adventure recipes to quickly outline an adventure based on your chosen theme. Reading other adventures is a great way to get ideas, whether they’re published adventures or ones your friends have written. You can borrow ideas and structures if they work for your game, and tweak as needed.

Player Motivations

One of your most important and rewarding tasks is getting to know your players and what makes them tick, then implementing plot hooks that speak to their motivations. If your players all like similar things (maybe they all like epic storylines, or all prefer tactical combat), your job will be a bit easier. But for most groups there’s a mix, and you’ll want to put in a detailed NPC who appeals to one player’s love of social scenes, a powerful villain to engage a player who loves stories of winning against overwhelming odds, and exotic animals that attract a player who’s into having animal friends. If you’re not sure what your players enjoy, ask them in advance what they’d like to see in the game!

Considering player motivations doesn’t mean assuming you know what the players or their characters will do! It can be risky to expect PCs to react in certain ways or take certain paths. Knowing their motivations gives you a way to put in elements you expect will appeal to your players, but their decisions will still take the adventure in unexpected directions. The important thing is getting the players engaged, not predicting the future.

Keeping it Varied

You can give players variety through the types of challenges the group faces (combat, social, problem-solving, and so on), the locations they explore, the NPCs they meet, the monsters they face, and the treasure they acquire. Even if you’re building an enclosed dungeon, you don’t want to place a combat in every room, or exploration will quickly become stale.

Think in terms of sessions. If your group gets through five scenes per session, how do you make one game session feel different from another? Maybe two of the scenes in each are fairly basic combat encounters, but if you make the other scenes significantly different, or even if you set the encounters in different environments, the sessions won’t feel repetitive. Also think about the tools used to solve each situation. Maybe one requires complex negotiations, another brute force, and a third sneaking about. Aim to give everybody something compelling, and ideally targeted at their motivations. This translates to mechanical details, too. Inching across a balance beam requires different skills than rebuilding a broken key.

Theme and Feeling

Think about the emotional and thematic touchstones you want to hit during play. Good games elicit strong emotions, and planning for them can give an emotional arc to an adventure in addition to the narrative arc. Consider what you want players to feel as they play. Is it triumph? Dread? Sadness? Optimism? None of these will be the only emotions to come out, but they will inform how you build the settings and NPCs. Adventure Recipes (below) gives steps to effectively implement theme and feeling.